The present invention relates generally to the field of casting and counting votes in an election and in particular to a voting system wherein individual votes may be easily verified and audited while maintaining the secrecy of each voter's selections.
The 2000 U.S. presidential election in Florida demonstrated the fallibility and general unreliability of many deployed voting systems. Accurate, reliable vote reading and tallying systems are crucial for public confidence in election results, which is the ultimate bedrock of the legitimacy of government in a representative democracy. Following the Florida elections, Congress passed a law called the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which appropriated $3.8 billion to replace punch-card and lever voting systems with computerized electronic voting systems. It is estimated that around 40 million votes were cast using electronic voting machines in the 2004 U.S. election. Electronic voting machines, however, are fraught with problems.
Many electronic voting machines capture voters' selections electronically, such as via touch-screen pads, and tally votes electronically. These machines do not generate an auditable paper trail. Without a voter-verifiable paper trail, proper auditing of results produced by the voting machine is difficult if not impossible. Since government agencies that purchase electronic voting machines are often denied access to the manufacturers' proprietary software, only the manufacturers can certify that the software counting the votes is completely bug-free, or that the machines are tamper-proof. Another problem with electronic voting machines is that election officials and poll workers may lack the technical skills to recognize anomalies, and may receive insufficient training in preparing, calibrating, certifying, operating, and troubleshooting the machines to ensure that they function as designed.
For example, six electronic touch-screen voting machines in Jackson and Wake counties, North Carolina, lost 436 ballots cast in early voting for the 2002 general election because of a software problem. As explained by the manufacturer, a programming glitch made the machines falsely sense that their memories were full. While the machines did display a brief error message, they continued to allow voters to cast votes—votes that were not recorded or added to the reported totals. The machines were new, and poll workers did not recognize that they were malfunctioning.
Election reform advocates generally agree on the need for a voter-verifiable, paper audit trail in voting systems. Various voting systems are known in the art by which a voter receives a receipt containing an identifier that allows the voter to later verify his vote, such as by entering the identifier into a web site published by the board of elections. However, these systems include no mechanism by which voter privacy is protected.
It has long been recognized that only when voters believe their votes are cast in secrecy, and that their privacy is maintained, is voting truly fair and free. Many voters may succumb to various sources of perceived pressure, rather than vote their true convictions, if they believe that their voting selections may become known, either generally or even by only one other person. Vote verification schemes that do not have specific measures in place to protect voter privacy will not be trusted.